II

She came downstairs in due course, dressed in a brown holland dress with

a big black straw hat tied with black ribbons under her chin. Her fresh

old face looked soft and powdered, her white hair escaped in puffs from

under her hat, on her nose she wore a pair of round horn spectacles, and

on her hands a pair of big brown leather gauntlets. Over her arm she

carried a garden basket, a pair of garden scissors dangling by a ribbon

from the handle. She was going to do the flowers first; one never knew,

at this time of year, whether a sudden shower might not come down and

dash their beauty.

In the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, the grandfather clock ticked

quietly. The doors all stood open; looking to the left she could see

into the sitting-room, with its deep, chintz-covered chairs and sofas;

looking to the right, down the passage, into the dining-room, where

presently luncheon would be laid for two; and straight ahead of her,

facing the stairs, was the front door, which opened on to the little

forecourt and the flagged path leading up to the porch. She went out.

Some white pigeons were sunning themselves on the roof of the great

barn; its doors were propped open, and a farm-hand came out, followed by

two farm horses, their hoofs going clop-clop after him, their harness

clanking loosely, and their blinkers and the high peaks of their collars

studded with shining brass nails. Their tails and manes were plaited up

with straw and red braid. Mrs. Martin nodded to the man, as he touched

his cap to her, and stood looking after the horses lumbering their way

out towards the lane. She liked having the farm so close at hand, and

had never thought of putting the barn, although it stood so near the

house, forming one side of the forecourt, to any other than farm uses.

She went across the court now, and looked into it. A smell of dust and

sacking; gold motes in a shaft of sunlight; two farm waggons with red

and blue wheels; a pile of yellow straw, and some trusses of hay. She

was very well content. Behind the barn stood the rickyard, and here were

the garnered stacks, pointed like witches’ hats, a double row of them:

the farm was doing well. When the time came, she would have a prosperous

inheritance to bequeath to her son.

She turned away from the shadows of the barn, and went through the door

in the wall that led into the garden. It was quite warm; the ground

steamed slightly, so that a faint mist hung low, and everything was wet,

with but a dangerously narrow margin between the last splendour of

autumn and its first sodden decay. She walked slowly up the garden path,

looking at the bronze, red, yellow and orange flowers that were bent

down towards the ground by the moisture; she walked up to the path,

swinging her scissors, till she came to the clump of Scotch firs at the

top of the garden, and stood surveying the country that swept down to

the valley, rising to the Downs beyond, the woods in the valley golden

through the mist, and blue smoke hanging above the deep violet pools of

shadow, between the woods and the hills; all unstirred by any breath;

rust-colour and blue in every shade from the pale tan of the stubble to

the fire of the woods, from the wreathing smoke-blue to the depths of

amethyst driven like wedges into the flanks of the Downs. Below the

clump of Scotch firs the ground fell away rapidly; in the valley gleamed

a sudden silver twist of the river. The river was Mrs. Martin’s

boundary, the natural frontier to her eight hundred acres. They had not

always been eight hundred acres. Once they had only been five hundred,

and only thanks to stringent frugality and a certain astuteness on Mrs.

Martin’s part had they been extended to that natural frontier which was

the river. She could not think of that astuteness now without a measure

of discomfort. Had she been _quite_ as fair as she might have

been—_quite_ as scrupulous? Would she ever have persuaded Mr.

Thistlethwaite to part with the required three hundred if she hadn’t

canvassed for him quite so enthusiastically before the poll? Was she

quite sure that she agreed with all his political convictions? Was she

even sure that she understood them? She dismissed these qualms,

hurriedly and furtively, when they nudged her. Anyway, the three hundred

acres were hers, and whatever she had done, she had done it for her son;

let that be her defence in everything. She would bring him out here

after luncheon, and he would stand looking over the valley, and possibly

he would say, as he had said once before, years ago, “I wish our land

went down as far as the river, don’t you?” And then in a great moment

she would reply “It does!” For she had never told him about the extra

three hundred acres; she had kept that secret out of the long weekly

letter she had written to him overseas during all the five years of his

absence. There was no detail of her life that she hadn’t told him; she

had told him, separately, about each of her dinner parties; about the

work on the farm, and about the agricultural experiments that she and

Lynes, the bailiff, were making, their failure or their success; she had

kept him informed of all the events in the village; but the three

hundred acres she had hugged to herself as a secret and a surprise.

Lynes was her accomplice; she had had to warn him that he must never let

out the secret should he have occasion to write to Mr. Henry. It had

created a great link between herself and Lynes. There had, of course,

been the danger that somebody or other in the district would be writing

to Henry on other matters, and would mention his mother’s purchase; but

up to the present it was clear from Henry’s letters that no one had done

so. He had written to her with fair regularity, though not so often as

she could have wished; but then she would have liked a letter by every

mail, as he received from her, and that was unreasonable; and though

sometimes his letters were brief, and clearly written in a hurry, she

was too loyal to ask herself what he could possibly have to do with his

evenings on a ranch where work would be finished by dusk.

She turned back along the path, and began cutting flowers wherewith she

filled her basket. She cut very carefully where it would not show. No

one else was allowed to cut the flowers. She was especially proud of

this, her autumn border. On either side of the path, until it was

brought up short at the end by the grey walls of the manor-house, it

smouldered in broad bands that repeated the colours of the autumn woods.

Orange snapdragon, marigold, and mimulus flowing forward on to the

flagged path; then the bronze of coreopsis and helenium, stabbed by the

lance-like spires of red-hot poker; and behind them the almost

incredible brilliance of dahlias reared against the background of dark

yew hedge. The border streamed away like a flaming tongue from the cool

grey of the house. She had worked very hard and studied much to bring it

to its present perfection; ten years of labour had at last been

rewarded. Behind the yew hedges, to either side, were squares of old

orchard, and the bright red apples nodded over the hedges like so many

bright eyes peeping at the borders. In the grass under the apple-trees

the bulbs lay dormant, that in the spring speckled the orchards with

grape-hyacinths, anemones, and narcissi; but Mrs. Martin had forgotten

about the spring. She was thinking, as she cut sheaves from the

coreopsis and, more sparingly, from the snapdragons, that the autumn

border was really the finest sight of the year, and that she was glad

Henry should be coming now, and at no other time.

In the house, where she had everything conveniently arranged in the

garden-room—a sink, taps, cloths for wiping the glasses, and a cupboard

full of flower vases—she proceeded leisurely to do the flowers. No one

had ever known Mrs. Martin be anything but leisurely; she always had

plenty to occupy her time, but she was never hurried or ruffled. It was

one of her greatest charms. She selected the flower vases with nice

care; some were of rough pottery, but those now stood on one side, for

she consecrated them to the spring flowers and to the roses; others were

of glass, like green bubbles, glaucous and iridescent, light to the

hand—for Mrs. Martin could not bear glasses that were not delicately

blown, and as no one ever touched them except herself, they never got

broken. She had a genius for handling fragility, quick and deft, and

curiously tender. She was now wondering whether Henry’s wife would some

day stand in her place at the sink in the garden-room. She often

wondered this, for Henry’s wife was a personage she had long since

absorbed into her thoughts. She thought of her without bitterness or

jealousy, simply as a part of Henry, and consequently as another person

to whom she would, in due course, have to hand over the house, the

garden, and the estate—to render an account of her stewardship. Mrs.

Martin was thinking about her as she snipped the ends off stalks that

were too long, and lifted the vases that were already filled on to the

tray standing ready to receive them. It made no difference that Henry

should not yet have come across his wife; she was not thereby entitled,

in Mrs. Martin’s eyes, to any separate existence of her own. She was

Henry’s wife; the future mistress, when Mrs. Martin was dead, of the

house and all it contained. It had taken a very long time for Mrs.

Martin’s mind to grow accustomed to this idea, but now that it was there

she accepted it quite placidly, and it came up in its turn for

examination amongst the other ideas, or was taken out when she wanted

something to think about. She had even got into the way of saying to

Lynes, or to the gardener, “I’m sure that Mrs. Henry would approve of

that,” and if, at first, they had been a little surprised, they had

quickly come to take Mrs. Henry quite for granted. She had even an

affection for Henry’s wife. She liked to think of them living here

together in the country, so far away from London—the country that was

England although London forgot about it—and of Henry tramping over the

eight hundred acres with a gun and a spaniel, while his wife stooped

over the flowers in the walled garden, and she never doubted that they

would frequently recall her, who had made the place what it was; recall

her with a sort of grudging tenderness—she was too humanly wise a woman

to expect more than that—and say, “The old lady ought to rest quietly in

her grave....” She carried the tray of flowers into the hall, and from

there distributed them; a big vase of coreopsis on each window sill in

the sitting-room, a bowl of marigolds on the table where the light of

the lamp would fall straight on to them in the evening, a bowl of

snapdragons in the centre of the hall, red and yellow nasturtiums on the

dining-room table. There remained two little pots of snapdragon, which

she took upstairs and put on the dressing-table in his bedroom. She came

down again. The bronze of the flowers, she thought, suited the house,

with its bits of oak panelling, the polished stairs of a golden-brown,

and the pile carpet of mouse-brown in the sitting-room. She was pleased

with her survey, though a little tired. She heaved the sigh of happy

tiredness. Five years alone here, alone except for the neighbours; and

although she liked being alone, and was quite content between Lynes and

her garden in the daytime, and her books in the evening, she was very

glad that Henry—who was really her unseen and constant companion, at the

back of her mind in everything she did—should be coming back to her at

last.